For promotion, an e-commerce website always proactively offers coupons to some users in an oriented manner or to all users in a public manner. A coupon is an electronic certificate, which may be a series of digits, a series of letters, or a picture. When paying a data transfer volume of a to-be-purchased item, a user may deduct a specific amount of cash or enjoy a specific percentage of discounts by giving a coupon to an online retailer. Moreover, in daily life, for promotion, a supermarket or a shopping center may also offer preference of enjoying a specific percentage of discounts when a specific amount is consumed.
Each coupon or discount rate set by a merchant of an e-commerce website or of a mall has a specific usage condition, that is, consumption needs to reach a specific amount, and this amount is generally relatively high.
According to the prior art, when a user wants to enjoy the foregoing discount preference, but a total price of items that the user wants to purchase cannot meet a coupon usage condition, the user can only ask, by means of a telephone call, an SMS message, or the like, whether a friend of the user has a shopping demand. If the friend of the user has the shopping demand, the user is notified, and the user places an order for both of them and pays an entire data transfer volume in advance, and then distributes items and reclaims a payable amount of the friend. This process is cumbersome and time-consuming, and has no reliable mechanism to ensure reclamation of the payable amount in time.